Time perspective and helpfulness: Are communicators more persuasive in the past, present, or future tense?

Abstract

When people share their experiences, they can communicate seemingly identical information from different time perspectives. Time perspective manifests in words—specifically, verbs in the past tense (e.g., “the experience was great”), the present tense (e.g., “the experience is great”), or the future tense (e.g., “the experience will be great”). This research considers whether this linguistic shift in time perspective impacts how others interpret the message. Two naturalistic studies (sourcing over 2 million Amazon reviews) and three pre-registered lab experiments (N = 1259) find that reviews written in the present tense (relative to the past or future tense) receive higher helpfulness ratings through a process of heightened concrete construal. Implications at the intersection of communication, psycholinguistics, and persuasion are discussed.